Robert Patrick prices skis for the 2013 Colorado Ski & Snowboard Expo at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver last November. The expo runs through Sunday at the Colorado Convention Center. (Photo by Erin Hull, The Denver Post)

I hear this phrase often: “Skiing is too expensive.”

If you walk up to a lift ticket window in January, skiing is indeed a pricey pursuit.
But if you make a plan to ski, riding a resort can be no more expensive than a night at the movies.
So really, skiing is pricey only for poor planners. With a season pass and a pinch of commitment, turns are available at prices from the 1970s.

The 24th annual Colorado Ski & Snowboard Expo takes over the Colorado Convention Center this weekend, with a bunch of last year’s gear for cheap and, most importantly, a final opportunity to pick up affordable lift ticket packages, vacation deals and multi-mountain ski passes.

Remnants of the annual Ski Rex Labor Day sale are tagged at deep discounts. Season-long ski rental deals for kids have buried the days of buying new ski gear in February for expanding and improving children. More than 30 resorts, hotels and travel companies will be offering last-chance purchases of all kinds of ski country passes and packages.

Of course, the 24th annual Expo amps the show with its festival attractions, from interactive draws like a ropes course, climbing wall and a Nordic biathlon simulator – guns and skis! – to Olympians, champion slackliners and beer.
The Expo is open noon to 10 pm Friday, Nov. 6, 10 am to 8 pm Saturday and 10 am to 6 pm Sunday. Admission is free for kids 12 and under and $15 for adults, but a coupon available in The Denver Post, or at any Colorado Ski & Golf or at Admission is $15 for adults. Get a $3 coupon in The Denver Post or at any Colorado Ski & Golf location or at bewisports.com/expos/Denver.

Your best excuse for calling in sick likely won’t hold a candle to these.

CareerBuilder today released its annual study of the most absurd excuses people have used for begging off work. The national survey, conducted by Harris Poll for CareerBuilder, included 3,321 full-time workers and 2,326 H.R pros across various industries and company sizes.

Putting a bike rack on the back of a Car2Go could possibly prevent the rear tailgate from being lowered, Car2Go says. (Car2Go)

What’s more important to Denver Car2Go members: bike racks or working tailgates? The popular car-share company aims to find out.

“As bicycling is such an integral part of daily life here in Denver, it’s no surprise that we’ve been very eager to find a solution that incorporates bike racks onto our car2go vehicles,” the company wrote Friday in an email to members.

Ok, so slap a bike rack on the car and whoever wants to use it can … right? Not so fast.

“It is important to note that the incorporated bike rack could prevent the tailgate, the hinged door at the rear of the vehicle, from being lowered,” the email continued.

Car2Go recently came under fire from many members for its decision to decrease its home service area in Denver. The move, which the company says is necessary to sustain its business, left about 8,050 members without service.

Car2Go ran a test bike rack program in Portland that ended with installation of racks on half the city’s vehicle fleet, according to the email.

As of August, Car2Go Portland 530 cars for more than 37,000 members. Denver, in comparison, has 350 cars for its 35,000 members.

Cinemark USA, Inc. is a co-defendant in a federal lawsuit filed in Denver on Thursday, April 7. The collective action suit alleges the theater and its janitorial services contractor, Simply Right, Inc., are in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. (Denver Post File)

The collective-action complaint for underpaid wages was filed in U.S. District Court in Denver alleging Cinemark USA and its janitorial services provider, Simply Right, are in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act by classifying janitorial employees as independent contractors to dodge minimum-wage and overtime laws. The lawsuit also names Simply Right owner Daniel Kilgore and manager Beatrice Perman as defendants.

“These folks are performing labor that they are required by law to be paid at least minimum wage for,” said Boulder-based attorney Brandt Milstein, who is representing the seven plaintiffs named in the suit. “If employers were allowed to pay less than minimum wage, all low-wage workers would suffer. It is beneath the dignity of any business in Colorado to pay any employees less than minimum wage.”

Simply Right workers were paid a flat rate instead of an hourly rate to do the theater-cleaning work, the lawsuit alleges. Read more…

Alligator wrangler Jay Young, owner of the Colorado Gator Farm and Reptile Park in Mosca, Colo., prepares a large fishing net to catch what is believed to be a a 7- to 9-foot-long alligator living in Harbor Regional Park in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Aug. 17 in 2005. (AP | Nick Ut)

Colorado Gators Reptile Park to the rescue. Park owner and renowned alligator expert Jay Young will take a team to Los Angeles next month to rescue Jaxson.

“If we don’t take her, she will probably be put down,” said Young, whose parents purchased 100 baby alligators to dispose of fish parts at their geothermal-heated, Tilapia-raising ranch near the San Luis Valley’s Mosca in 1987, creating what would become one of Colorado’s most unique tourist attractions.

Young always has accepted alligators. He’s got more than 200 from across the country at his park, including the 500-pound Morris, the hand-snatching star of the movie “Happy Gilmore.” But traditionally people deliver alligators to Young, who keeps the reptiles until they reach the end of their lives, which can be 90 years.

Jaxson is about 40 years old. Young said he would have to build Jaxson her own habitat – at a cost of about $2,000 – because the younger alligators might attack her.

Colorado Gators has started a Go Fund Me campaign to help raise funds for transport from L.A. and the new habitat.

Let’s say you go to your local Chipotle for lunch at noon on a weekday, and it takes, say, 7 minutes from the time you walk in the door, decide what to eat, order, receive your food and pay. In the time it took you to receive your delicious burrito, Chipotle CEO Steve Ells made $336. Read more…

Intrawest CEO Bill Jensen in October 2011, shortly after Intrawest moved its corporate headquarters from Vancouver to the 18th Street Atrium building in Downtown Denver. Photo by Hyoung Chang / The Denver Post

Intrawest on Friday announced the promotion of Thomas Marano as the new chief executive, effective immediately.

Jensen, who took the reins of Intrawest in 2008, a year after the then British Columbia-based company acquired Steamboat ski area for $239 million, cited “personal reasons” for his departure. The former Vail Resorts executive – he served 11 years with the company in Vail as the head of Vail Mountain and then the company’s growing mountain division – commuted between Denver and his home in Vail.

His wife Cheryl, who lives in Vail, is a Vail Valley hero. She heads the Vail Veterans Program she founded in 2004 to host wounded warriors, chairs the volunteer committee for the upcoming 2015 World Alpine Championships and directs her growing Share Warmth Around the Globe program, shipping used ski resort uniforms to communities in need around the world.

Jensen said in a statement that Intrawest “is well positioned to continue to build on the success and progress the entire team has made over the past five years and most recently since our IPO earlier this year.”

Jensen moved Intrawest from Canada in 2011, taking over a floor on the historic 18th Street Atrium building in Lower Downtown. The move put the resort closer to its two largest U.S. resorts: Steamboat and Winter Park, which it operates for the city of Denver. The company was once the largest resort operator in North America but in 2009 company owner Fortress, the New York hedge fund that bought Intrawest in 2006, began shedding Intrawest’s ski areas to pay down debt.

Marano was the chief executive at Residential Capital from 2008 to 2013, guiding the residential real estate finance company through bankruptcy since May 2012. In his statement he said looked forward to increasing company value and improving guest experience.

“I believe there are significant near and long-term opportunities to create meaningful value for all shareholders,” Marano said in a statement.

From his humble start in an alley off Santa Fe Drive, IMT founder Ben Parsons has led an oenological revolution in wine-making, pressing an array of wines available in kegs, cans and traditional bottles. Parsons fueled an explosion of urban wineries across the Front Range, which has surpassed Colorado’s Western Slope wine country as the state’s top producing wine region.

Parsons now is taking his canned-and-kegged wine model to Texas, opening a winery in a 6,000 sqaure-foot former mechanics workshop. The space will include a tasting room and an IMT kegging facility. Parsons’ push to make wine more accessible to the masses – not the sole domain of fancy-glass sippers – has made him a pioneer of kegged wines. His Iron Monkey Kegging is tracking toward becoming a national leader in kegged vino, offering kegging services for wineries across the country. The Texas facility, which like the Denver winery will use locally harvested grapes, will grow IMT’s national presence in the nascent wine kegging industry.

“Our no-pretense, no-vineyard approach bringing wines to the masses will appeal to the counter-culture of this city. The Infinite Monkey Theorem will definitely play its role to help Austin Weird,” said Parsons in a statement. “We’ve had many opportunities and considered a number locations nationwide for our next urban winery. Texas is another exciting emerging wine region and we see a lot of potential for The Infinite Monkey Theorem to play an innovative role in its growth.”

The Nevada Gaming Control Board last week apparently gave its approval for a small restaurant to license five slot machines — but said it would only do so if it found a different operator.

Seems that the company that was to run those slots has a tangential connection to the medical marijuana trade. The owner’s wife has an 8-percent interest in a medical-MJ business, and that’s enough for the control board to wave its red flags, according to published reports.

It’s not at all clear what the operator — Nevada Gaming Partners — is to do about the 40-or-so other locations where it runs slot machines.

The control board apparently said its decision was based in part on the fact that marijuana remains illegal under federal laws.

Wrote one board member: “Unless the federal law is changed, the board does not believe investment or other involvement in a medical marijuana facility or establishment by a person who has received a gaming approval or applied for a gaming approval is consistent with the effective regulation of gaming.”

One-arm bandits remain legal, and as long as there’s no doobie anywhere nearby, there shouldn’t be any trouble.

Skiers and snowboarders go down the Homerun trail at Park City Mountain Resort in November 2013. (Salt Lake Tribune file)

As a Utah district court judge prepares to sign an order that would evict Powdr Corp. from a majority of the terrain at its flagship Park City Mountain Resort, Powdr is pleading and promising a “catastrophic” blow to the local economy if evicted.

The 20-year operator of Park City Mountain Resort has asked the judge – who has already ruled against Powdr on several critical points in the high profile lease dispute – to delay the eviction order. It’s asking the judge to postpone enforcement of the order until the company appeals the judge’s May decision that Powdr’s lease to use a majority of the land beneath its flagship resort had expired when it failed to file lease renewal paperwork with landowner Talisker Corp. in 2011. The resort operator also wants the judge to delay payment of any back rent and restitution, which Talisker says is at least $7.7 million plus damages for loss of use, until after final hearings and the appeal process.

Talisker wants Vail Resorts to take over Park City Mountain Resort. Vail Resorts in 2013 leased Talisker’s neighboring Canyons ski area. That deal had Vail Resorts handling the lease litigation with Powdr on the promise that it would take over the Park City Mountain Resort land if Talisker emerged victorious.

Powdr, which includes Colorado’s Copper Mountain in its portfolio of nine resorts in six states, detailed its plans to yank chairlifts if evicted.

The operator said it would spend $4 million over 33 weeks to remove all snowmaking equipment, restaurant furniture, maintenance equipment and towers, cables and drives for 12 chairlifts on the disputed land. If it removed all its equipment, Vail would not have time to install the needed infrastructure to keep Park City Mountain Resort open next season, Powdr told the judge.

Emilie Rusch covers retail and commercial real estate for The Post. A Wisconsin native and Mizzou graduate, she moved to Colorado in 2012. Before that, she worked at a small daily newspaper in South Dakota. It's the one with Mount Rushmore.